The Power of the Harmoniously Combined

Tag Archives: toungue

My father and many other members of the mad-man, Madison clan, would tell you that we have a history of people with artistic or scientific genius. Now, whether that’s true, is not the point…the point is that our family is a bit on the eccentric side – although to be truly eccentric, don’t you have to be wealthy…the difference having been stated that a poor person is termed crazy; and the rich one – well, eccentric? Anyway, with all that eccen-tricity running through the family genes, we were bound to come up with ways of doing things, and phrases all our own.

I’ve always admired people who are the first to coin things…to name them, or come up for a word that fits an idea or a concept or a symbol. Issac Asimov is one of those of a rare breed, what I like aptly to call, the “Coiners”. Now, I’m not for certain, here – but I think I recall that Mr. Asimov, in one of his billions of books – (not really, but he sure did write a lot!) – claimed that he had coined the term, “Robot”. Again, I could be wrong – often times I am; and that makes me much more a diplomat than a genius; but then again, I could be right!

So, what’s a “fwoplusal”? That’s a good question; and all I can really say, is that it’s more of a feeling – you see – as a kid, I got really frustrated and bashed things up a bit, when I couldn’t express exactly what I was feeling. It was kinda like the word that’s at-the-tip-of-your-tongue – a vague, uneasy feeling that a word is dodging and darting and smacking you in the head and slapping you in the face, yet when you reach out, you’re just too slow and come up empty-handed. That uneasy feeling happened a lot in my childhood and pissed me off a great deal – to see those puzzled expressions of my childhood playmates or even logical-seeming adults…was torture. I mean, it seemed logical in my mind, and so it should be easily understood by others, huh? So, again, what’s a “fwoplusal”? A “fwoplusal” is a word that came to me when I couldn’t think of another word that embodied all that I wanted to say in one of my earlier posts. A “fwoplusal” is a whole lot of stuff that on the surface, may seem un-connected, yet when you delve deeper, one slowly discovers the hidden web of inter-relatedness between them all.

I get “fwop”, from the Elmer Fudd accent on flop…to flop down, but the ‘w’ denotes packing a much bigger ‘wop’ into the ‘flop’ (for the ‘flop just wouldn’t do this particular expression of a concept justice), seeming to draw us to the conclusion that there isn’t just one thing we’re flopping down, but a whole bunch of stuff. The “lusal”, part reminds me of refusal, and plural; like the refusal to be named, because there’s just too damned much junk in my head that seems unrelated, that I’ve studied, and the of course, not singular, but plural. And finally, “lusal” also speaks to the way I feel at times – that I just might LOSE IT, if I can’t get the right word down in time to express what’s going on inside this convoluted brain of mine.

So, there you have it…the meaning of “fwoplusal”; in case you were interested.